It is the year of the woman, all right. But only for Democrats.
The number of Republican women in Congress next year will actually drop, even as the ranks of Democratic women swell to record heights. With a few races still undecided, the new Congress will have at least 105 Democratic women and 19 Republican women.
But that is not all: From Congress to governor to state legislatures, far more Democratic women ran in this cycle than Republican women. And that means fewer Republican women on the bench, gathering experience and credentials to move up to the next level.
As the incoming freshman class of the 116th Congress gathers in Washington this week for orientation, the only Republican woman attending was Carol Miller of West Virginia (she could be joined by a few others whose races are still too close to call).
“I know that we need to up our game on the Republican end,” said Kelly Ayotte, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire who is on the board of Winning for Women, which was founded last year to encourage and finance Republican women to run for office.
Ms. Ayotte cautioned that one election cycle — particularly a midterm election when the party out of power typically makes gains and many Republican women were reluctant to run in what looked like a Democratic year — should not be seen as a trend. But political scientists who track women in public office note a longstanding disparity between the number of Democratic and Republican women at the federal and statewide levels.
“There’s been a Republican woman problem for a while — it didn’t start this year,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at the Center for American Women and Politics. “But it is illuminated by the fact that when you drop by one, two, three or four, you’re getting down to such a small level of representation for women because you had no padding.”
In Congress, the last drop in the number of Republican women was after the 2012 elections, between the 112th and 113th Congress, when it fell from 29 to 23.
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